October 7, 2024 • 45 mins
What if everything you thought you knew about the disappearance of William Tyrrell was … wrong?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
When I think of William, I think of a little
boy who I think of his dimples. You know, when
he smiled.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
What if I told you everything you thought you knew
about the disappearance of William Tyrrel was wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
This side smile that just is cheeky, m but sweet
and funny and mischievous, all kind of wrapped into one.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Not the big things, those are true. A three year
old boy missing from a tiny country town on the
mid north coast of New South Wales, and ten years
later we've still not found him.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
He just shone this little smile and a bit of
swagger about him, but also a bit of a shark,
a shy guy as well.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But what about everything else, Like how the police say
they know what happened, they know why, they know how,
they know where William is. The police suspect William's foster
mother is involved, But what if they're wrong. I do
know there are other people with no alibi for what
(01:27):
they were doing on the morning William vanished, who have
never been asked to explain that in public, And I
do know there are gaps in the evidence.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
And then obviously we've watched lots of home videos and
he's giggle, and I heard that giggle in real life,
and it's dynamic and it's beautiful and it's vibrant, and yeah,
he's just a sweet boy.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I do know the police did get some things wrong
going right back to the beginning, and real people's lives
were damaged as a result, including the lives of children.
This case has left a trail of broken lives behind it,
and a lot of what you've seen in the newspapers,
(02:29):
on TV, or social media is mistaken or misleading.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
One of the challenges that I think has been a
part of William's disappearance is that there are many people
who have their own stories.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
So where do we start with this story? Well, how
about with William's parents.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
William is not a post a child for somebody else.
He's not a campaign, He's not a vehicle for somebody
else to express their own view and disgruntledness.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
One thing you might not know is, at the time
William went missing, legally, his parents were not the couple
who conceived him. His parents weren't the foster careers he
was living with on the day he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
William has his own story. William is his own person.
William's family in many ways has been exploited by other
people with their own agendas of what they want to achieve.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
As a foster child. There was a court order in
place which meant William was under what the law called
the parental responsibility of a state government minister.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
And I think that that's a really sad.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I think it's an indictment on ours as a society
that we allow that to happen, and that we hunger
for that when we go clicking through social media and
all kinds of things looking for that stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
But of course the minister didn't do the day to
day parenting. That responsibility was passed on. So the person
who decided if William went on holiday, who was told
if he got sick or injured, Who was responsible for
his health and his safety? Whose job it was to
know where William was? So his parent that was this woman,
(04:28):
Michelle White.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
William deserves to have his own story.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
He shouldn't be exploited for any other purpose.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I'm Dan Box and from news dot com dot Au.
This is witness William till.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Yeah, hi, my son.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Did you think he's three and a half?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
You're this is a triple ocre where William's foster mother
is reporting him missing to police. This is the twelfth
of September twenty fourteen, a Friday, and it's at ten
fifty six am, and that time will become important. His
(05:14):
foster mother says William went missing around ten thirty am.
And later his foster mother would get criticized for this call,
for being too calm. People will say that a real
mother wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
And we heard roaring around the garden and I haven't
heard him.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
A bit of go in.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Okay, you can make your own mind up. When I
listen to this, I wonder if I can hear a
woman who's just holding it together, who's doing her best
to tell the police what they need to know to
help her child, because right now the stakes couldn't be higher.
Thousands of children are reported missing every year in Australia,
(05:55):
but most are found within hours or days or a week.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
Wasn't anyone vicious in the area.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
People Around a dozen children die by homicide each year,
and most are killed by someone in their family. A few,
and it's a very few are abducted, but it does happen.
There's one US study that shows that three quarters of
children who are abducted are murdered within the first three hours,
(06:27):
and nine out of ten of them are dead within
the first.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Day's probably near state Borest. Okay, we've walked up and
down and we can't find in.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
This call is being made from William Thiol's foster grandmother's house,
so that's the house of his foster mother's mum. It's
a big brick house on a dead end road called
Beneroom Drive. The road is quiet and it's empty. There's
a few houses, each of them on big blocks, and
(07:00):
the road doesn't lead anywhere, so you wouldn't go there
if you didn't have a reason to. Benuruin Drive is
a short way outside a small town called Kendall, which
is on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
The town's named after a poet, Henry Kendall, and he
wrote about the eucalypt forest and the sound of the
bell birds in the morning, and that kind of suits
(07:24):
the place. When you drive into Kendall, you go over
the bridge, then you cross a railway line and then
you go up past the village green and there's a
war memorial and it's surrounded by bush. There's just a
handful of shops and a few wooden houses. It's the
kind of place you'd move to if you wanted to
know your neighbors and you want to have them know
(07:46):
your business too. The first time I went to Kendall,
I flew in. I was a crime reporter for a newspaper,
and this was shortly after he went missing, and I
remember you were right over dense forest and looking down
out the plane window you could just see this thick,
tangled bush and in between it pools of what looked
(08:09):
like blackwater, and very few roads and hardly any paths,
and looking down from the air, I remember thinking, if
William is lost in that kind of country, we're never
going to find him. It's been ten years now since
William disappeared, and he's still missing. So in this series,
(08:33):
we're going to look at the case in a way
that it hasn't been looked at before. We're not trying
to find William, but what we are going to do
is try to find out why it's taken police ten
years to find him and they still haven't done it.
We're going to look at what they've done right and
(08:53):
what they've done wrong, and we're going to see how
those decisions would come to damage the lives of so
many people in ways that no one talks about. And
I don't know what answers we're going to find, at
least not yet, but I do know that we are
going to find some answers.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Hello, Michelle White speaking.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
We're going to start at the beginning. It's me just
talking with the woman you heard from at the start
of this episode.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
It just feels so weird when you're just doing a
sound check.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Doesn't it just confirm that you are happy that this
be recorded.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yes, yeah, happy.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
If you would.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Introduce yourself in your role, what would you say?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
So, my name is Michelle and my role was the
director and principal officer of the non government out of
home care organization that had responsibility for the care of
William and the authorization of his foster cares.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
What did you like about the job?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
There was so much I loved about working at Young Hope.
I founded the service children don't choose to come into care.
Children love their families, irrespective of the circumstances that bring
them into care. So being able to work with their
families and work with their cares to create safe places
(10:27):
and help them to see who they are and to
help them to dream big dreams for their futures.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
This is the first time Michelle was given an interview
to a journalist, and she and I are sitting in
her house in a small office, surrounded by stacks of paper.
There's a filing cabinet and outside it there's children's toys
just everywhere across the floor. You can hear in her
voice that Michelle is serious. She's quite intent, and that's
(10:57):
because her job is important. Understand why it's important. You
need to understand the system she was working in. Kids
get taken away from their birth families because the government
thinks it needs to protect them because their families can't.
But that government system has always struggled for funding. There's
(11:18):
never been enough money. And at the time William went missing,
the system was also going through huge change. All those
children that were in government care were being transferred to
third party providers like the organization called Young Hope, which
Michelle founded.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
And that was quite an intensive transfer period and it
meant a lot of new service providers came on board.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So you got this huge process of reform of change.
Was it working or was problems being thrown up?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
I'm not going to answer that.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, but there were problems, there were agreements over money,
there was problems with the paperwork. One example of that
is that the single document confirming when William Pile started
foster care says that he started on the fifth of
September twenty thirteen, so the year before he went missing,
(12:17):
But the document is dated the twenty first of either
October or November twenty fourteen. It's hard to read with
the handwriting, but either way that's after he disappeared, regardless
of the date on the document. Though, William's foster careers
were already looking after him before Michelle took over responsibility
(12:40):
for that placement.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So the way that William and his foster cares came
to be with Young Hope is that there was a
process of transition from the Department of Communities and Justice,
and William's careers had identified that they would like to
seider coming across to Young Hope, and so I met
(13:03):
with them and we didn't just accept that they were
fit and proper based on somebody else's assessment. We did
our own independent assessment. I think that if I am
ultimately legally responsible for children under my care and ultimately
signing off on decisions that impact the future lives of
(13:25):
children that I need to be informed by some knowledge
of them and get to know them to some degree.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
One of the decisions that Michelle still lives with is
that she gave approval for William's foster care is to
take him to Kendall, which is where he went missing.
It was a family trip to visit his foster grandmother.
They'd made it before, they'd been given approval before, but
Michelle did allow it.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
William was a child who was under the care of
an organization I had responsibility for.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Whilst I am.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Not responsible for William's disappearance, I had responsibility for him,
and so I made a very strong commitment to myself
and to him that I would not walk out on
finding out what has happened to him.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Michelle's been interviewed by police more than once over the
years after William went missing. She flew up to Kendall
to spend time with his foster family. That was part
of her job.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
I expected to arrive to years that William had been found.
There were masses of people looking for William, looking for
him everywhere. The longer William went missing, the more and
more resources came to try and find him, everything from
(15:15):
police on motorbikes, horses, divers. They went in drains, they
cleared ponds, they pumped things out, they went in dams,
they went in waterways, They went through the houses in
the block multiple times. Under round about it was. I
sat in the house with William's sister and it was
(15:40):
searched multiple times. On one occasion, officers from the Public
Order and Riot squad came through and we actually had
to get off the lounge and they lifted up the
cushions and they even took photos off the wall and
looked behind the photos, and you know, it was that
kind of extentive of search. I remember under the house
(16:04):
was this big mound of dirt. I don't even know
how else to describe it. I'm not even sure what
it was, but remember feeling really helpless a few times,
and even I myself climbed in under there just to
even look. Of course, he wasn't there, he wasn't there,
he wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Michelle also watched Williams foster parents. This is what she
was trained for. Her job was to protect the welfare
of the children in her care and if something happened
to one of them. Her job was to ask questions.
Her mind had to go to those bad places. Michelle
knows the statistics that show that if a child gets
(16:45):
hurt or worse, mostly almost always, it's those closest to.
Speaker 5 (16:52):
Them who were to blame.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I asked her what she saw in Williams's foster parents.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Absolute distress, visceral distress. I remember.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
When I first arrived and the male foster Caira collapsing
into me and sobbing into my neck, the female foster Kira,
collapsing at different points and having to lift her from
(17:34):
the ground where she'd collapsed, heaving sobs of where is he?
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Where is he?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You know, then getting information, Oh, we might have found him.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Almost from the moment william disappeared, there was confusion. There
were sightings of him, there were rumors, people said they'd
seen him all over.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
The and I remember, in one particular time being told, oh,
we've might have found him, and the three of us
separately being showed a photo of a little boy that
they thought they'd found, and all of us thinking it
might be him. But it constantly misses with your mind,
and just the ups and downs of that journey and
(18:21):
just going. It was a completely surreal world.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
And at the time or looking back, did you see
anything that made you doubt the foster parents or believe
there might be something more than they were telling you
about what happened?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Not at all, not once.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And given since William went missing, there have been years
of police investigation. Now there's been a coronial inquest into
his apparent death. Has anyone asked you about what you
saw in those first few days when you were with
his foster parents.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Nobody has asked me about what I observed in his
foster parents those first few days.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
No, Michelle did keep extensive records though, questioning what she
saw in the days, weeks, and months that followed. These
have since been tended in court, so were public records.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Then in recent years.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
The police came asking other questions.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yes, I was interviewed about William's disappearance, and he became
evident during that interview that happened in October of twenty
twenty one that the investigation appeared to be making inquiries
(20:02):
of the female foster carer. And I was very surprised
about that angle, and there were questions being asked that
made no sense to me.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
One possible reason that their questions didn't make any sense
to Michelle is that she was on heavy painkillers at
the time following an operation.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
They seemed to be focus on apparent different things.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
This was a few years ago and the current strike
force who are now working on the case, and two
detectives who turned up at Michelle's door without warning saying
they needed to do an interview. Michelle says she was
in her pajamas. She says she told the detectives she
was on this medication, but they went ahead with the interview.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I've never been asked about what I observed. I was
in the home with William's foster parents. I spent all
day every day with them for I think it was
nine days after William disappeared. I was on the property.
I walked around the property. I took photos of the property.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
I did all of.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
That, and they weren't making inquiries about those things.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
When you were being interviewed by them, and I think
you were talking to them for five hours or thereabouts.
Did they give you a sense of what they were
thinking William's foster mother may have done.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
No, they didn't, just that they implied that she had
something to do with William's disappearance and that all would
be forthcoming in a few days. Interestingly, at the time,
Cleo was missing in Western Australia, and during that interview
(22:05):
they said to me, surely you know you don't think
that somebody else has come into the tent. You can't
tell me that you wouldn't hear the zipper.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
To understand this, you need to know about another missing child,
four year old Cleosmith living.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
First tonight, a young wa family is in the middle
of a nightmare ordeal. Their little girl is missing after
vanishing from their tent at a remote campsite in the state's.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
North searching the fence line for fingerprints.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
Forensics today examining the family home of four year old
Cleo Smith.
Speaker 8 (22:41):
Hurry up, my daughter's gone.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
How old your daughter us? Cleo was camping with her
family in Western Australia on the sixteenth of October twenty
twenty one, and she went missing from a tent in
which her family was sleeping. So at the time the
Western Australia Police were investigating that disappearance, the New South
(23:06):
Wales detectives were asking Michelle questions about William going missing.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
They asked me, what I thought had happened to Cleo,
and I said that I didn't know. They said words
to the effect of, surely you'd hear somebody undoing a
zipper if your child was sleeping next to you, and
I took it to mean that, yeah, surely, if there's
(23:32):
no other answers that are apparent, then it's the parent,
and the implication being similar in the situation of William missing,
when there's no other clear answer, it must be her.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
And what did you think of that?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I became upset with them, and I said, are you
telling me that, after this many years, this is the
best you've got? And the interviewing officer became angry with
me and began to raise his voice and said he's
been working on this three year and he's focused on
finding William. And he was implying to me that he
(24:13):
was the only person who cared about finding William. I
became quite upset and began to cry, and I said,
quite abruptly to him, don't you dare sit in my
home and accuse me of not caring about William. And
I pointed to a picture that I had sitting on
a filing cabinet and said, you may have been working
(24:34):
on this for a year, but I've lived with this
since Williams disappeared and he backed off.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And that's that photograph you've got on the filing cabinet there.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
In Cleo's case, it turned out it wasn't her family
who abducted her.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
It is one of the most extraordinary stories of the year.
Four year old Cleo Smith this morning has been found.
Speaker 9 (25:00):
Alive and well police breaking into a locked home in
Canarvan where she was found in a room.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
I can confirm that we have a man from Canarvon
in custody who is currently being questioned by detectives.
Speaker 10 (25:19):
Kidnapper, the doll obsessed loner, Terence Kelly.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Little Cleo left locked in a room allowed radio used
to conceal her cries.
Speaker 9 (25:27):
He had his fantasies and he was trying to make
them come to life.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
It just happened to be that it was our.
Speaker 7 (25:34):
Tent that he got into.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
The point being that in the vast majority of cases
it does turn out to be the parents, but not all.
In Cleo's case, her family didn't hear the tent zipper.
The New South Wales police are now focused on William's
foster mother, they went to charter her. So only one
(26:00):
of two things can be true. Either the police are
right and she's a criminal and she has misled the
entire country for ten years by seeming to be an
innocent grieving mother, or the police are wrong, and that
matters because William is not the only child that's been
(26:22):
taken from those foster parents.
Speaker 7 (26:31):
And that's someone else's house, a foster home, and I
want to go to your house, and I love this one.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yes, we'll talk about this more later in the series,
but I'm legally prevented from telling you who that child is.
So much of this case is surrounded in secrecy. Right
from the beginning, there's been almost two versions of this story.
What the police and the media knew about William's disappearance
(26:57):
and what the public were allowed to be told, and
the space between them was vast. Right at the beginning,
the state government even said that the fact William was
a foster child couldn't be made public. I remember getting
the emails that said journalists could go to prison if
we did print that. Even today, we can't name or
(27:21):
identify William's foster cares, and so much else about this case.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
Is still secret.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
There's been inquest hearings behind closed doors. There's been statutory
bars on what we can and can't report. There's been
court orders suppressing what we can say. I remember going
to one court registry and asking to see the publicly
available documents relating to William's disappearance and just being told,
don't even bother filling in the form. That thing is suppressed.
(27:52):
It's closed down. You'll never get it.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
All.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
This secrecy is supposed to protect witnesses and the chance
of getting a prosecution, but it also protects the police.
We're just supposed to trust them.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Hello, true crimer errs.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
This is the case of William Tyrrel And.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
At the same time that secrecy creates speculation.
Speaker 10 (28:16):
We've seen some pretty major updates in the disappearance of
three year old William Tyre.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Just moments after this photo was taken, this young boy
and the inquest so she was babysiteing two young boys.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
One of them said that he knew who killed William.
Seeing a detective has dropped a major bombshell in the mystery.
Speaker 7 (28:35):
A spot communications session using me ap.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Who is responsible for William Tyrell's death.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Is it possible that William was spotted playing at his
foster grandmother's place and he was snatched. The worst of
this happens on the internet, but it also has real
effects in real life.
Speaker 10 (29:00):
I can't recall if the word pedophile was used, but
there was certainly some suspicion.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
I think this is Ben Outwood.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
He was William's caseworker, meaning he worked with the birth
and the foster families, overseeing William's foster placement, trying to
get the best for William.
Speaker 10 (29:19):
Look, I can understand why they'd ask, because it's not
It's not normal that you take photos of a child
that's not yours and have the mon youphone.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Ben gave evidence in court about William's disappearance and he
became a target for online abuse.
Speaker 10 (29:38):
It is normal in the sense that that was a
protocol that we had. We were issued with a work
phone with a camera because part of the purpose of
our visits was to document, you know, ordinary moments, so
that when William turned eighteen and got his file, he
would have not just case notes, which are legally necessary
(30:01):
and tell the story of his care, but he would
have just images of himself being a kid and having
a normal life. That was the purpose for which I
took images of William, whether it was pictures of him
with his birth mom and dad at contact, or whether
it was.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
You know, stupid selfies.
Speaker 10 (30:24):
Where he's wearing superhero costumes. You know, it was quite
normal for me, and I think my reaction when I
read those sort of suggestions was, well, you just don't
understand the reasoning.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Ben had those photos on his phone for a good reason.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
It was his job.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
He cared about William. People said the worst things about
him online, things that just were not true. But what
people said about him is just the tip of the
iceberg of what's been said about others.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
In this case, cocaine addict FF sold William to pedo ring.
Speaker 9 (31:06):
I'm interested in seeing him in handcuffs.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Him and his wife and their mother.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Cold cold people they are. How do they sleep at night? Sleep?
Speaker 8 (31:15):
Pedophile rapist Doc William has been murdered by his narcissistic
psychopath foster mother and the corpse, then dismembered and courted
for disposal by the besotted foster.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Father motley crew of pedophile mates.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
He loves little boys.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Tell me to my face, I'm wrong, you weak dog.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
William has been murdered name them and shame them, then
send the family the bill for the bullet.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
All of this stuff is false, but the courts they
can't stop people publishing it. Nor can they stop them
sharing the names and addresses of William's birth and foster parents.
The courts can't stop them sharing images of their houses
from Google Earth, or stop them making road trips to
(31:58):
visit those houses. And when they get there, these people
take photographs of the houses and then share those online.
I've seen them turn up in court taking photographs of
themselves flashing V signs with the police in the background,
like there's some kind of celebrities in a homicide investigation.
(32:19):
Nor can the court stop the sharing of confidential documents
about this case, including witness statements, phone records, police interview transcripts.
All of these are now flying around online. I've been
sent them. And at the same time as the foster
parents are under all of this online surveillance, they're also
(32:41):
under police surveillance. They've had listening devices in their car
and in their home. They've had their phone calls intercepted,
surveillance cameras posted outside their house. They've been targeted by
undercover detectives. We can't tell you their names or show
you their photographs. But they been under almost total surveillance
(33:02):
now for years. It's like the police, the media, the public,
no one can stop talking about this case.
Speaker 8 (33:09):
Good evening, We begin tonight with breaking news on one
of Australia's most baffling cases, the disappearance of three year
old William Tyrell almost a decade ago.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
The final part of an inquest into the disappearance of
New South Wales toddler William Tyrell has begun.
Speaker 8 (33:24):
Secret recordings from inside the home of William Tyrell's faster
parents have been played in court today.
Speaker 4 (33:29):
You probably haven't heard of Alana Smith.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
Then there's the information that for the first time tonight
is being made public by police.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Well the worst case of malicious prosecution in the state.
Speaker 8 (33:40):
Detectives now believe there's enough evidence to charge the toddler's
foster mother.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
Detectives are recommending the woman be charged with interfering with
a corpse and perverting the course of justice.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Foster mother has always denied involvement in the little boy's disappearance.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So what's your impression of the foster pearance of William Tyrel.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
It's the other is guilty of this. She is the
greatest actor in Australian criminal history.
Speaker 6 (34:04):
So if anyone out there is thinking I might have
gotten away with this, what's your message?
Speaker 5 (34:09):
They haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
We will continue with this investigation as long as it
takes okay.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
So basically, you're saying we have no idea who killed
William and we're no closer to finding that out.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
The thing is, almost everyone talking about this case doesn't
know much, if anything, about it. Ben Atwood is one
of the few who actually knew William. Ben looked at
the birth and the foster families after William disappeared. I've
been through pages of Ben's documents of records he drew
up when he was William's caseworker. He was looking for faults,
(34:58):
for patterns, any sign that will might not be safe.
Speaker 10 (35:03):
I want to be realistic about this as much as possible.
There's so much coverage where the differences between the birth
family and the foster family have really been magnified and polarized.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
But the experience of being interviewed by police made Ben
question if he was wrong to trust William's foster family.
Speaker 10 (35:27):
And I'd be lying if I said that I never
looked back on that and thought, did I miss anything,
Did I make a mistake?
Speaker 5 (35:37):
Was I.
Speaker 10 (35:40):
Inattentive to something that actually was significant? And I just
can't think of anything.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
My eldest daughter is the same age as William Tyrol
is the same age William would be or would have been.
And I can remember the first time I went to Kendall,
standing outside the house where William went missing, and at
(36:15):
the time, the police were looking at the theory that
maybe he ran down the grass slope towards the road
where maybe there was someone in a waiting car who
picked him up and drove him away. And I can remember,
I can remember being there, and I knew how a
(36:35):
three year old moved. I knew how my daughter could
have run down that slope and been picked up and
been completely helpless.
Speaker 5 (36:43):
And I can.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Remember shivering and it bothering me in a way that
no other story I'd ever worked on ever did.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
And it's ten years now.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
My youngest daughter is the same age William was at
the time he disappeared. And I do know that if
it was one of my daughters who'd gone missing, I'd
have wanted there to be a transparent investigation. I would
want the media to report the truth about what had happened.
(37:23):
I would want people shouting my daughter's name in every
newspaper and every TV show and every podcast, and that
is what I would have wanted to have happened.
Speaker 10 (37:48):
Sorry, can I start again? Yeah, I do take I
took my responsibility for William's care seriously. Part of it
was also not adding to the furnace of speculation that
(38:10):
this was generating. I did not want to become entangled
in that because I wanted the investigation to be focused
on what was important, which was finding William.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Like Michelle White, this is the first time Ben has
spoken to a journalist. We met first in a cafe
in Western Sydney and Ben was nervous, he was uncertain,
and then we met again in my office and it
was like Ben was determined, like he was reconciled to
face this.
Speaker 10 (38:42):
But in the last few years, I feel that William
has almost disappeared from the public discourse about this case.
I feel that he's really faded into the back ground
and other things have taken his place. And I'm not
(39:05):
special or anything like that, but I knew him, I
knew him well, and I think it's important that.
Speaker 5 (39:18):
I wish.
Speaker 10 (39:19):
I wish he was alive and here and that none
of this was happening, But we can't have that now,
and so I think in lieu of that, I wish
that he was remembered and honored for who he was.
And I think I can, I can at least comment
on what I knew. And we don't know what happened
(39:45):
to him. We don't know if he's alive or not.
We don't know if he was abducted, if so, who
took him. We don't know anything. But what I feel
looking at the coverage is that gradually William has really
become a bit of a footnote and has been replaced
by conjecture. And you know, I'm not going to comment
(40:14):
on police hypotheses, particularly matters that are in court. That's
not my field, that's not my expertise. But I do
have this sense that William has become an absence. He's
been an absence since he was missing, but he's become
an absence in his own investigation. In a sense, looking
(40:36):
back at it now, are you disappointed? I feel confused.
I feel confused because I don't understand, like, what's the
calculus that's driving the directions the investigation is taking. You know,
as William's caseworker, my job was to be an tick
(41:00):
it for him and for his care and so in
talking about the what we've talked about, it's a kind
of grief to me that we are still we don't
feel any closer, and I feel that we may never
(41:24):
really know, we may never really have an answer, we
may never have a point where we can really grieve
for William because we know what happened. I have to
be careful how I say this, Based on everything that
(41:47):
you know. I know from when I was in William's
life and in the lives of his families, I don't
feel that we're any closer now to finding out what happened.
I don't think that we've made significant steps in that direction.
Speaker 5 (42:04):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Talking to Michelle and Ben, I've learned their professionals with
a professional responsibility to ask questions about what happened to William,
and that is what they've done over the past ten years,
including asking questions of themselves. They don't care who's right
or wrong. Their responsibility is not to the police or
(42:35):
William's foster parents, but to William. And they've gone back
searching their memories because not asking those questions would be
to fail William. That's what we're going to do over
the rest of this series, going back to the beginning,
asking questions, revealing what was done right in the search
(42:57):
for William and what was done wrong and who got
hurt as a result of those decisions. People get hurt
in these investigations.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
We all look back in hindsight on things that you
know you could do better, or decisions that you make
that you could have done differently.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Everyone does that, or you know, if you've got a conscience,
you do that. Anyway, we're going to reinvestigate the investigation.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
On Bill spreading.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yes, look, the reality of this is I don't think
you're going to enjoy this conversation.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
We're going to look back on what really happened.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
It's the never ending nightmare. We just relive it. We
just don't have our boy.
Speaker 7 (43:38):
Don't hurt him.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
So if I look you in the eye now and
say I know you're lying, and I'm not even going
to tell you why or how I know you're lying.
Speaker 10 (43:59):
What would just well, I'd say you're must him the
Treu William projects to you.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
One thing I do know for certain is that things
you didn't know will become known. Take one example, that
time that William Tirele disappeared from Kendall on the twelfth
of September twenty fourteen. That wasn't even the first time
that he went missing.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Hi heap come for three months. I arranged the whole
you're the mastermind. Yeah, that's right. I should have just
took myself in the nile. We've been able to take
him off me. That's all I should have done.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
That's next time on Witness. A lot of people have
been involved in making this series. Among them, the executive
producer is Nina Young. The sound design was by Tiffany Dimack.
The producers have been Emily Pigeon, Nicola Adams, Jazzbar and
(45:01):
Phoebe Zakowski Wallace. Research by Aidan Patrick, music by Rory O'Connor.
Our lawyer is Stephen Combs, and the editor at news
dot com dot au is Kerry Warren.
Speaker 5 (45:14):
I'm Dan Box
When I think of William, I think of a little
boy who I think of his dimples. You know, when
he smiled.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
What if I told you everything you thought you knew
about the disappearance of William Tyrrel was wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
This side smile that just is cheeky, m but sweet
and funny and mischievous, all kind of wrapped into one.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Not the big things, those are true. A three year
old boy missing from a tiny country town on the
mid north coast of New South Wales, and ten years
later we've still not found him.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
He just shone this little smile and a bit of
swagger about him, but also a bit of a shark,
a shy guy as well.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
But what about everything else, Like how the police say
they know what happened, they know why, they know how,
they know where William is. The police suspect William's foster
mother is involved, But what if they're wrong. I do
know there are other people with no alibi for what
(01:27):
they were doing on the morning William vanished, who have
never been asked to explain that in public, And I
do know there are gaps in the evidence.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
And then obviously we've watched lots of home videos and
he's giggle, and I heard that giggle in real life,
and it's dynamic and it's beautiful and it's vibrant, and yeah,
he's just a sweet boy.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I do know the police did get some things wrong
going right back to the beginning, and real people's lives
were damaged as a result, including the lives of children.
This case has left a trail of broken lives behind it,
and a lot of what you've seen in the newspapers,
(02:29):
on TV, or social media is mistaken or misleading.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
One of the challenges that I think has been a
part of William's disappearance is that there are many people
who have their own stories.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
So where do we start with this story? Well, how
about with William's parents.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
William is not a post a child for somebody else.
He's not a campaign, He's not a vehicle for somebody
else to express their own view and disgruntledness.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
One thing you might not know is, at the time
William went missing, legally, his parents were not the couple
who conceived him. His parents weren't the foster careers he
was living with on the day he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
William has his own story. William is his own person.
William's family in many ways has been exploited by other
people with their own agendas of what they want to achieve.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
As a foster child. There was a court order in
place which meant William was under what the law called
the parental responsibility of a state government minister.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
And I think that that's a really sad.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I think it's an indictment on ours as a society
that we allow that to happen, and that we hunger
for that when we go clicking through social media and
all kinds of things looking for that stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
But of course the minister didn't do the day to
day parenting. That responsibility was passed on. So the person
who decided if William went on holiday, who was told
if he got sick or injured, Who was responsible for
his health and his safety? Whose job it was to
know where William was? So his parent that was this woman,
(04:28):
Michelle White.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
William deserves to have his own story.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
He shouldn't be exploited for any other purpose.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I'm Dan Box and from news dot com dot Au.
This is witness William till.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Yeah, hi, my son.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Did you think he's three and a half?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
You're this is a triple ocre where William's foster mother
is reporting him missing to police. This is the twelfth
of September twenty fourteen, a Friday, and it's at ten
fifty six am, and that time will become important. His
(05:14):
foster mother says William went missing around ten thirty am.
And later his foster mother would get criticized for this call,
for being too calm. People will say that a real
mother wouldn't do that.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
And we heard roaring around the garden and I haven't
heard him.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
A bit of go in.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Okay, you can make your own mind up. When I
listen to this, I wonder if I can hear a
woman who's just holding it together, who's doing her best
to tell the police what they need to know to
help her child, because right now the stakes couldn't be higher.
Thousands of children are reported missing every year in Australia,
(05:55):
but most are found within hours or days or a week.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
Wasn't anyone vicious in the area.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
People Around a dozen children die by homicide each year,
and most are killed by someone in their family. A few,
and it's a very few are abducted, but it does happen.
There's one US study that shows that three quarters of
children who are abducted are murdered within the first three hours,
(06:27):
and nine out of ten of them are dead within
the first.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Day's probably near state Borest. Okay, we've walked up and
down and we can't find in.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
This call is being made from William Thiol's foster grandmother's house,
so that's the house of his foster mother's mum. It's
a big brick house on a dead end road called
Beneroom Drive. The road is quiet and it's empty. There's
a few houses, each of them on big blocks, and
(07:00):
the road doesn't lead anywhere, so you wouldn't go there
if you didn't have a reason to. Benuruin Drive is
a short way outside a small town called Kendall, which
is on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
The town's named after a poet, Henry Kendall, and he
wrote about the eucalypt forest and the sound of the
bell birds in the morning, and that kind of suits
(07:24):
the place. When you drive into Kendall, you go over
the bridge, then you cross a railway line and then
you go up past the village green and there's a
war memorial and it's surrounded by bush. There's just a
handful of shops and a few wooden houses. It's the
kind of place you'd move to if you wanted to
know your neighbors and you want to have them know
(07:46):
your business too. The first time I went to Kendall,
I flew in. I was a crime reporter for a newspaper,
and this was shortly after he went missing, and I
remember you were right over dense forest and looking down
out the plane window you could just see this thick,
tangled bush and in between it pools of what looked
(08:09):
like blackwater, and very few roads and hardly any paths,
and looking down from the air, I remember thinking, if
William is lost in that kind of country, we're never
going to find him. It's been ten years now since
William disappeared, and he's still missing. So in this series,
(08:33):
we're going to look at the case in a way
that it hasn't been looked at before. We're not trying
to find William, but what we are going to do
is try to find out why it's taken police ten
years to find him and they still haven't done it.
We're going to look at what they've done right and
(08:53):
what they've done wrong, and we're going to see how
those decisions would come to damage the lives of so
many people in ways that no one talks about. And
I don't know what answers we're going to find, at
least not yet, but I do know that we are
going to find some answers.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Hello, Michelle White speaking.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
We're going to start at the beginning. It's me just
talking with the woman you heard from at the start
of this episode.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
It just feels so weird when you're just doing a
sound check.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Doesn't it just confirm that you are happy that this
be recorded.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yes, yeah, happy.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
If you would.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Introduce yourself in your role, what would you say?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
So, my name is Michelle and my role was the
director and principal officer of the non government out of
home care organization that had responsibility for the care of
William and the authorization of his foster cares.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
What did you like about the job?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
There was so much I loved about working at Young Hope.
I founded the service children don't choose to come into care.
Children love their families, irrespective of the circumstances that bring
them into care. So being able to work with their
families and work with their cares to create safe places
(10:27):
and help them to see who they are and to
help them to dream big dreams for their futures.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
This is the first time Michelle was given an interview
to a journalist, and she and I are sitting in
her house in a small office, surrounded by stacks of paper.
There's a filing cabinet and outside it there's children's toys
just everywhere across the floor. You can hear in her
voice that Michelle is serious. She's quite intent, and that's
(10:57):
because her job is important. Understand why it's important. You
need to understand the system she was working in. Kids
get taken away from their birth families because the government
thinks it needs to protect them because their families can't.
But that government system has always struggled for funding. There's
(11:18):
never been enough money. And at the time William went missing,
the system was also going through huge change. All those
children that were in government care were being transferred to
third party providers like the organization called Young Hope, which
Michelle founded.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
And that was quite an intensive transfer period and it
meant a lot of new service providers came on board.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So you got this huge process of reform of change.
Was it working or was problems being thrown up?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
I'm not going to answer that.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, but there were problems, there were agreements over money,
there was problems with the paperwork. One example of that
is that the single document confirming when William Pile started
foster care says that he started on the fifth of
September twenty thirteen, so the year before he went missing,
(12:17):
But the document is dated the twenty first of either
October or November twenty fourteen. It's hard to read with
the handwriting, but either way that's after he disappeared, regardless
of the date on the document. Though, William's foster careers
were already looking after him before Michelle took over responsibility
(12:40):
for that placement.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
So the way that William and his foster cares came
to be with Young Hope is that there was a
process of transition from the Department of Communities and Justice,
and William's careers had identified that they would like to
seider coming across to Young Hope, and so I met
(13:03):
with them and we didn't just accept that they were
fit and proper based on somebody else's assessment. We did
our own independent assessment. I think that if I am
ultimately legally responsible for children under my care and ultimately
signing off on decisions that impact the future lives of
(13:25):
children that I need to be informed by some knowledge
of them and get to know them to some degree.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
One of the decisions that Michelle still lives with is
that she gave approval for William's foster care is to
take him to Kendall, which is where he went missing.
It was a family trip to visit his foster grandmother.
They'd made it before, they'd been given approval before, but
Michelle did allow it.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
William was a child who was under the care of
an organization I had responsibility for.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Whilst I am.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Not responsible for William's disappearance, I had responsibility for him,
and so I made a very strong commitment to myself
and to him that I would not walk out on
finding out what has happened to him.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Michelle's been interviewed by police more than once over the
years after William went missing. She flew up to Kendall
to spend time with his foster family. That was part
of her job.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
I expected to arrive to years that William had been found.
There were masses of people looking for William, looking for
him everywhere. The longer William went missing, the more and
more resources came to try and find him, everything from
(15:15):
police on motorbikes, horses, divers. They went in drains, they
cleared ponds, they pumped things out, they went in dams,
they went in waterways, They went through the houses in
the block multiple times. Under round about it was. I
sat in the house with William's sister and it was
(15:40):
searched multiple times. On one occasion, officers from the Public
Order and Riot squad came through and we actually had
to get off the lounge and they lifted up the
cushions and they even took photos off the wall and
looked behind the photos, and you know, it was that
kind of extentive of search. I remember under the house
(16:04):
was this big mound of dirt. I don't even know
how else to describe it. I'm not even sure what
it was, but remember feeling really helpless a few times,
and even I myself climbed in under there just to
even look. Of course, he wasn't there, he wasn't there,
he wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
Michelle also watched Williams foster parents. This is what she
was trained for. Her job was to protect the welfare
of the children in her care and if something happened
to one of them. Her job was to ask questions.
Her mind had to go to those bad places. Michelle
knows the statistics that show that if a child gets
(16:45):
hurt or worse, mostly almost always, it's those closest to.
Speaker 5 (16:52):
Them who were to blame.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I asked her what she saw in Williams's foster parents.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Absolute distress, visceral distress. I remember.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
When I first arrived and the male foster Caira collapsing
into me and sobbing into my neck, the female foster Kira,
collapsing at different points and having to lift her from
(17:34):
the ground where she'd collapsed, heaving sobs of where is he?
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Where is he?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You know, then getting information, Oh, we might have found him.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Almost from the moment william disappeared, there was confusion. There
were sightings of him, there were rumors, people said they'd
seen him all over.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
The and I remember, in one particular time being told, oh,
we've might have found him, and the three of us
separately being showed a photo of a little boy that
they thought they'd found, and all of us thinking it
might be him. But it constantly misses with your mind,
and just the ups and downs of that journey and
(18:21):
just going. It was a completely surreal world.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
And at the time or looking back, did you see
anything that made you doubt the foster parents or believe
there might be something more than they were telling you
about what happened?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Not at all, not once.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
And given since William went missing, there have been years
of police investigation. Now there's been a coronial inquest into
his apparent death. Has anyone asked you about what you
saw in those first few days when you were with
his foster parents.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Nobody has asked me about what I observed in his
foster parents those first few days.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
No, Michelle did keep extensive records though, questioning what she
saw in the days, weeks, and months that followed. These
have since been tended in court, so were public records.
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Then in recent years.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
The police came asking other questions.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yes, I was interviewed about William's disappearance, and he became
evident during that interview that happened in October of twenty
twenty one that the investigation appeared to be making inquiries
(20:02):
of the female foster carer. And I was very surprised
about that angle, and there were questions being asked that
made no sense to me.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
One possible reason that their questions didn't make any sense
to Michelle is that she was on heavy painkillers at
the time following an operation.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
They seemed to be focus on apparent different things.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
This was a few years ago and the current strike
force who are now working on the case, and two
detectives who turned up at Michelle's door without warning saying
they needed to do an interview. Michelle says she was
in her pajamas. She says she told the detectives she
was on this medication, but they went ahead with the interview.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I've never been asked about what I observed. I was
in the home with William's foster parents. I spent all
day every day with them for I think it was
nine days after William disappeared. I was on the property.
I walked around the property. I took photos of the property.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
I did all of.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
That, and they weren't making inquiries about those things.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
When you were being interviewed by them, and I think
you were talking to them for five hours or thereabouts.
Did they give you a sense of what they were
thinking William's foster mother may have done.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
No, they didn't, just that they implied that she had
something to do with William's disappearance and that all would
be forthcoming in a few days. Interestingly, at the time,
Cleo was missing in Western Australia, and during that interview
(22:05):
they said to me, surely you know you don't think
that somebody else has come into the tent. You can't
tell me that you wouldn't hear the zipper.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
To understand this, you need to know about another missing child,
four year old Cleosmith living.
Speaker 6 (22:21):
First tonight, a young wa family is in the middle
of a nightmare ordeal. Their little girl is missing after
vanishing from their tent at a remote campsite in the state's.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
North searching the fence line for fingerprints.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
Forensics today examining the family home of four year old
Cleo Smith.
Speaker 8 (22:41):
Hurry up, my daughter's gone.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
How old your daughter us? Cleo was camping with her
family in Western Australia on the sixteenth of October twenty
twenty one, and she went missing from a tent in
which her family was sleeping. So at the time the
Western Australia Police were investigating that disappearance, the New South
(23:06):
Wales detectives were asking Michelle questions about William going missing.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
They asked me, what I thought had happened to Cleo,
and I said that I didn't know. They said words
to the effect of, surely you'd hear somebody undoing a
zipper if your child was sleeping next to you, and
I took it to mean that, yeah, surely, if there's
(23:32):
no other answers that are apparent, then it's the parent,
and the implication being similar in the situation of William missing,
when there's no other clear answer, it must be her.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
And what did you think of that?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I became upset with them, and I said, are you
telling me that, after this many years, this is the
best you've got? And the interviewing officer became angry with
me and began to raise his voice and said he's
been working on this three year and he's focused on
finding William. And he was implying to me that he
(24:13):
was the only person who cared about finding William. I
became quite upset and began to cry, and I said,
quite abruptly to him, don't you dare sit in my
home and accuse me of not caring about William. And
I pointed to a picture that I had sitting on
a filing cabinet and said, you may have been working
(24:34):
on this for a year, but I've lived with this
since Williams disappeared and he backed off.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
And that's that photograph you've got on the filing cabinet there.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
In Cleo's case, it turned out it wasn't her family
who abducted her.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
It is one of the most extraordinary stories of the year.
Four year old Cleo Smith this morning has been found.
Speaker 9 (25:00):
Alive and well police breaking into a locked home in
Canarvan where she was found in a room.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
I can confirm that we have a man from Canarvon
in custody who is currently being questioned by detectives.
Speaker 10 (25:19):
Kidnapper, the doll obsessed loner, Terence Kelly.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Little Cleo left locked in a room allowed radio used
to conceal her cries.
Speaker 9 (25:27):
He had his fantasies and he was trying to make
them come to life.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
It just happened to be that it was our.
Speaker 7 (25:34):
Tent that he got into.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
The point being that in the vast majority of cases
it does turn out to be the parents, but not all.
In Cleo's case, her family didn't hear the tent zipper.
The New South Wales police are now focused on William's
foster mother, they went to charter her. So only one
(26:00):
of two things can be true. Either the police are
right and she's a criminal and she has misled the
entire country for ten years by seeming to be an
innocent grieving mother, or the police are wrong, and that
matters because William is not the only child that's been
(26:22):
taken from those foster parents.
Speaker 7 (26:31):
And that's someone else's house, a foster home, and I
want to go to your house, and I love this one.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yes, we'll talk about this more later in the series,
but I'm legally prevented from telling you who that child is.
So much of this case is surrounded in secrecy. Right
from the beginning, there's been almost two versions of this story.
What the police and the media knew about William's disappearance
(26:57):
and what the public were allowed to be told, and
the space between them was vast. Right at the beginning,
the state government even said that the fact William was
a foster child couldn't be made public. I remember getting
the emails that said journalists could go to prison if
we did print that. Even today, we can't name or
(27:21):
identify William's foster cares, and so much else about this case.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
Is still secret.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
There's been inquest hearings behind closed doors. There's been statutory
bars on what we can and can't report. There's been
court orders suppressing what we can say. I remember going
to one court registry and asking to see the publicly
available documents relating to William's disappearance and just being told,
don't even bother filling in the form. That thing is suppressed.
(27:52):
It's closed down. You'll never get it.
Speaker 9 (27:55):
All.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
This secrecy is supposed to protect witnesses and the chance
of getting a prosecution, but it also protects the police.
We're just supposed to trust them.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Hello, true crimer errs.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
This is the case of William Tyrrel And.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
At the same time that secrecy creates speculation.
Speaker 10 (28:16):
We've seen some pretty major updates in the disappearance of
three year old William Tyre.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Just moments after this photo was taken, this young boy
and the inquest so she was babysiteing two young boys.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
One of them said that he knew who killed William.
Seeing a detective has dropped a major bombshell in the mystery.
Speaker 7 (28:35):
A spot communications session using me ap.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Who is responsible for William Tyrell's death.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Is it possible that William was spotted playing at his
foster grandmother's place and he was snatched. The worst of
this happens on the internet, but it also has real
effects in real life.
Speaker 10 (29:00):
I can't recall if the word pedophile was used, but
there was certainly some suspicion.
Speaker 5 (29:06):
I think this is Ben Outwood.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
He was William's caseworker, meaning he worked with the birth
and the foster families, overseeing William's foster placement, trying to
get the best for William.
Speaker 10 (29:19):
Look, I can understand why they'd ask, because it's not
It's not normal that you take photos of a child
that's not yours and have the mon youphone.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Ben gave evidence in court about William's disappearance and he
became a target for online abuse.
Speaker 10 (29:38):
It is normal in the sense that that was a
protocol that we had. We were issued with a work
phone with a camera because part of the purpose of
our visits was to document, you know, ordinary moments, so
that when William turned eighteen and got his file, he
would have not just case notes, which are legally necessary
(30:01):
and tell the story of his care, but he would
have just images of himself being a kid and having
a normal life. That was the purpose for which I
took images of William, whether it was pictures of him
with his birth mom and dad at contact, or whether
it was.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
You know, stupid selfies.
Speaker 10 (30:24):
Where he's wearing superhero costumes. You know, it was quite
normal for me, and I think my reaction when I
read those sort of suggestions was, well, you just don't
understand the reasoning.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Ben had those photos on his phone for a good reason.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
It was his job.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
He cared about William. People said the worst things about
him online, things that just were not true. But what
people said about him is just the tip of the
iceberg of what's been said about others.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
In this case, cocaine addict FF sold William to pedo ring.
Speaker 9 (31:06):
I'm interested in seeing him in handcuffs.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Him and his wife and their mother.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Cold cold people they are. How do they sleep at night? Sleep?
Speaker 8 (31:15):
Pedophile rapist Doc William has been murdered by his narcissistic
psychopath foster mother and the corpse, then dismembered and courted
for disposal by the besotted foster.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Father motley crew of pedophile mates.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
He loves little boys.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Tell me to my face, I'm wrong, you weak dog.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
William has been murdered name them and shame them, then
send the family the bill for the bullet.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
All of this stuff is false, but the courts they
can't stop people publishing it. Nor can they stop them
sharing the names and addresses of William's birth and foster parents.
The courts can't stop them sharing images of their houses
from Google Earth, or stop them making road trips to
(31:58):
visit those houses. And when they get there, these people
take photographs of the houses and then share those online.
I've seen them turn up in court taking photographs of
themselves flashing V signs with the police in the background,
like there's some kind of celebrities in a homicide investigation.
(32:19):
Nor can the court stop the sharing of confidential documents
about this case, including witness statements, phone records, police interview transcripts.
All of these are now flying around online. I've been
sent them. And at the same time as the foster
parents are under all of this online surveillance, they're also
(32:41):
under police surveillance. They've had listening devices in their car
and in their home. They've had their phone calls intercepted,
surveillance cameras posted outside their house. They've been targeted by
undercover detectives. We can't tell you their names or show
you their photographs. But they been under almost total surveillance
(33:02):
now for years. It's like the police, the media, the public,
no one can stop talking about this case.
Speaker 8 (33:09):
Good evening, We begin tonight with breaking news on one
of Australia's most baffling cases, the disappearance of three year
old William Tyrell almost a decade ago.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
The final part of an inquest into the disappearance of
New South Wales toddler William Tyrell has begun.
Speaker 8 (33:24):
Secret recordings from inside the home of William Tyrell's faster
parents have been played in court today.
Speaker 4 (33:29):
You probably haven't heard of Alana Smith.
Speaker 8 (33:32):
Then there's the information that for the first time tonight
is being made public by police.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Well the worst case of malicious prosecution in the state.
Speaker 8 (33:40):
Detectives now believe there's enough evidence to charge the toddler's
foster mother.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
Detectives are recommending the woman be charged with interfering with
a corpse and perverting the course of justice.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Foster mother has always denied involvement in the little boy's disappearance.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So what's your impression of the foster pearance of William Tyrel.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
It's the other is guilty of this. She is the
greatest actor in Australian criminal history.
Speaker 6 (34:04):
So if anyone out there is thinking I might have
gotten away with this, what's your message?
Speaker 5 (34:09):
They haven't.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
We will continue with this investigation as long as it
takes okay.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
So basically, you're saying we have no idea who killed
William and we're no closer to finding that out.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
The thing is, almost everyone talking about this case doesn't
know much, if anything, about it. Ben Atwood is one
of the few who actually knew William. Ben looked at
the birth and the foster families after William disappeared. I've
been through pages of Ben's documents of records he drew
up when he was William's caseworker. He was looking for faults,
(34:58):
for patterns, any sign that will might not be safe.
Speaker 10 (35:03):
I want to be realistic about this as much as possible.
There's so much coverage where the differences between the birth
family and the foster family have really been magnified and polarized.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
But the experience of being interviewed by police made Ben
question if he was wrong to trust William's foster family.
Speaker 10 (35:27):
And I'd be lying if I said that I never
looked back on that and thought, did I miss anything,
Did I make a mistake?
Speaker 5 (35:37):
Was I.
Speaker 10 (35:40):
Inattentive to something that actually was significant? And I just
can't think of anything.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
My eldest daughter is the same age as William Tyrol
is the same age William would be or would have been.
And I can remember the first time I went to Kendall,
standing outside the house where William went missing, and at
(36:15):
the time, the police were looking at the theory that
maybe he ran down the grass slope towards the road
where maybe there was someone in a waiting car who
picked him up and drove him away. And I can remember,
I can remember being there, and I knew how a
(36:35):
three year old moved. I knew how my daughter could
have run down that slope and been picked up and
been completely helpless.
Speaker 5 (36:43):
And I can.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Remember shivering and it bothering me in a way that
no other story I'd ever worked on ever did.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
And it's ten years now.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
My youngest daughter is the same age William was at
the time he disappeared. And I do know that if
it was one of my daughters who'd gone missing, I'd
have wanted there to be a transparent investigation. I would
want the media to report the truth about what had happened.
(37:23):
I would want people shouting my daughter's name in every
newspaper and every TV show and every podcast, and that
is what I would have wanted to have happened.
Speaker 10 (37:48):
Sorry, can I start again? Yeah, I do take I
took my responsibility for William's care seriously. Part of it
was also not adding to the furnace of speculation that
(38:10):
this was generating. I did not want to become entangled
in that because I wanted the investigation to be focused
on what was important, which was finding William.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Like Michelle White, this is the first time Ben has
spoken to a journalist. We met first in a cafe
in Western Sydney and Ben was nervous, he was uncertain,
and then we met again in my office and it
was like Ben was determined, like he was reconciled to
face this.
Speaker 10 (38:42):
But in the last few years, I feel that William
has almost disappeared from the public discourse about this case.
I feel that he's really faded into the back ground
and other things have taken his place. And I'm not
(39:05):
special or anything like that, but I knew him, I
knew him well, and I think it's important that.
Speaker 5 (39:18):
I wish.
Speaker 10 (39:19):
I wish he was alive and here and that none
of this was happening, But we can't have that now,
and so I think in lieu of that, I wish
that he was remembered and honored for who he was.
And I think I can, I can at least comment
on what I knew. And we don't know what happened
(39:45):
to him. We don't know if he's alive or not.
We don't know if he was abducted, if so, who
took him. We don't know anything. But what I feel
looking at the coverage is that gradually William has really
become a bit of a footnote and has been replaced
by conjecture. And you know, I'm not going to comment
(40:14):
on police hypotheses, particularly matters that are in court. That's
not my field, that's not my expertise. But I do
have this sense that William has become an absence. He's
been an absence since he was missing, but he's become
an absence in his own investigation. In a sense, looking
(40:36):
back at it now, are you disappointed? I feel confused.
I feel confused because I don't understand, like, what's the
calculus that's driving the directions the investigation is taking. You know,
as William's caseworker, my job was to be an tick
(41:00):
it for him and for his care and so in
talking about the what we've talked about, it's a kind
of grief to me that we are still we don't
feel any closer, and I feel that we may never
(41:24):
really know, we may never really have an answer, we
may never have a point where we can really grieve
for William because we know what happened. I have to
be careful how I say this, Based on everything that
(41:47):
you know. I know from when I was in William's
life and in the lives of his families, I don't
feel that we're any closer now to finding out what happened.
I don't think that we've made significant steps in that direction.
Speaker 5 (42:04):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Talking to Michelle and Ben, I've learned their professionals with
a professional responsibility to ask questions about what happened to William,
and that is what they've done over the past ten years,
including asking questions of themselves. They don't care who's right
or wrong. Their responsibility is not to the police or
(42:35):
William's foster parents, but to William. And they've gone back
searching their memories because not asking those questions would be
to fail William. That's what we're going to do over
the rest of this series, going back to the beginning,
asking questions, revealing what was done right in the search
(42:57):
for William and what was done wrong and who got
hurt as a result of those decisions. People get hurt
in these investigations.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
We all look back in hindsight on things that you
know you could do better, or decisions that you make
that you could have done differently.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Everyone does that, or you know, if you've got a conscience,
you do that. Anyway, we're going to reinvestigate the investigation.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
On Bill spreading.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yes, look, the reality of this is I don't think
you're going to enjoy this conversation.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
Yeah, tell me about it.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
We're going to look back on what really happened.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
It's the never ending nightmare. We just relive it. We
just don't have our boy.
Speaker 7 (43:38):
Don't hurt him.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
So if I look you in the eye now and
say I know you're lying, and I'm not even going
to tell you why or how I know you're lying.
Speaker 10 (43:59):
What would just well, I'd say you're must him the
Treu William projects to you.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
One thing I do know for certain is that things
you didn't know will become known. Take one example, that
time that William Tirele disappeared from Kendall on the twelfth
of September twenty fourteen. That wasn't even the first time
that he went missing.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Hi heap come for three months. I arranged the whole
you're the mastermind. Yeah, that's right. I should have just
took myself in the nile. We've been able to take
him off me. That's all I should have done.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
That's next time on Witness. A lot of people have
been involved in making this series. Among them, the executive
producer is Nina Young. The sound design was by Tiffany Dimack.
The producers have been Emily Pigeon, Nicola Adams, Jazzbar and
(45:01):
Phoebe Zakowski Wallace. Research by Aidan Patrick, music by Rory O'Connor.
Our lawyer is Stephen Combs, and the editor at news
dot com dot au is Kerry Warren.
Speaker 5 (45:14):
I'm Dan Box
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